Atlas, Anna Clyne’s new piano concerto, co-commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, takes its title and its inspiration from a four-volume compendium of photographs and drawings assembled by the German visual artist Gerhard Richter. The concerto was written for Jeremy Denk, who gave the first performance in Dallas in March, and he was also the soloist for the UK premiere, with the CBSO and its chief conductor, Kazuki Yamada.
Following Richter’s example, Clyne describes Atlas as a “musical montage and a lucid narrative”. It’s certainly discursive; each of the four movements in the half-hour-long work has a descriptive title, but the moods of all of them change so rapidly, that the labels seem irrelevant. The quicksilver changes of mood and direction are mostly prompted by the extrovert piano writing, projected with real wit by Denk, and allusions abound: there’s a hint of the Dies Irae plainchant in the opening movement, and later references to pentatonic orientalism, a churchy chorale, and distinctly Bachian counterpoint; the overall impression is of a brilliantly coloured musical scrapbook, artfully assembled.
At the beginning of next season Yamada becomes the CBSO’s music director, and the rapport he has with the orchestra after his first year in Birmingham was clear from the swaggering way in which they launched the concert with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, giving just the right amount of louche to its bluesy tropes, and superbly controlling its climaxes. Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Défunte did suffer from Yamada’s rather funereal tempo, but Pictures at an Exhibition ended the concert on a real high. This was not the familiar Ravel 1922 orchestration of Mussorgsky’s piano original, or even one of those like Stokowski’s or Ashkenazy’s that’s sometimes heard, but a version that predates them all, made by Henry Wood in 1915.
Wood’s scoring is more interventionist than Ravel’s. He omits all but the opening Promenade; his textures are generally heavier, their level of dissonance higher. Not all his ideas are convincing, but some are striking – camel bells off-stage in Bydlo, an organ to add weight to the textures in the final Great Gate of Kiev. It may lack the finesse of the Ravel version, but it’s a real orchestral showpiece that Yamada and his band clearly appreciated.
